Once you have secured your business website with a SSL certificate and you have used the SSL checker to see if everything is correct and running smoothly, your quest for online security shouldn’t stop there. With normal emails about as secure as a postcard, you should then turn your attention towards upping your email security, with the help of Certificate Authorities, including Symantec, who operate what was previously known as VeriSign.
During a normal email conversation, you are sending a message that travels through various mail servers before arriving at its final destination. Any one of these mail servers has the potential of recording the contents of your email, which, in plain text form, is easy to do. Individuals, no matter how savvy they think they are, have a habit of sending sensitive data via email which can cause no end of issues. In fact, you may as well write your bank details on the back of the postcard, with your sign in details, post it and hope for the best.
Luckily, for the security conscious among us, there are ways of making your emails trusted as well as the possibility of encrypting them so that sensitive data is indecipherable. If you use a digital signature, recipients can be safe in the knowledge that the email is authentic. If it’s encrypted too, recipients will know that it is for their eyes only.
Digital signatures are recognised by the majority of desktop email clients, such as Outlook and Thunderbird. Unfortunately, due to the requirement for uploading private keys to the web (which isn’t recommended), web-based email clients can be problematic and Digital IDs are rarely compatible.
Encrypted mail will still travel through the same mail server pathways as before, except this time, nobody would have been able to read any of the contents, improving the confidence and trust that you have and vastly increasing your online security. What are you waiting for?
Image Credit – mcsholding.com